Camera Work: On with the Show! (page 2)

Setting up Your Equipment

Whether you're working with one camera or four, setting them up for performance taping is critically important.

Remember that these camcorders and their operators will have to stay in the same place, working in the dark, perhaps with audience members around them, for up to two hours or longer. Here are some tips for obtaining the best from both humans and hardware.

• Tripod. A good sturdy tripod is important and a smooth-moving head is a must. With the lens set at telephoto lengths, every jiggle and jerk is painfully obvious on-screen. Most tripods have an extendible center column. Because they reduce tripod stability, use these only for a fixed camera that's recording the wide angle cutaways.
• Monitor. An external monitor is essential. If you have to glue your eye to a camcorder viewfinder, half an hour's shooting will give you a serious crick. A whole show'll make you feel like Quasimodo after a night's repose on the roof tiles of Notre Dame.
  A five- or nine-inch monitor placed below the tripod head will let the camera person comfortably work the tripod handle with one hand and the focus and zoom controls with the other.
  Incidentally, if you plan to do considerable work like this, look for a camcorder with zoom on the remote control, for even greater flexibility.
  Of course, if you have to shoot in the midst of the audience, a conventional monitor would be too bright and distracting. In this situation, an external LCD monitor works well, though its limited resolution and short battery life can pose problems.
• Power. Uninterrupted power is essential for taping longer programs, and that means extension cords. When shooting from the audience, try to set up near a wall outlet. If that's not practical, use duct tape to secure every foot of your cable so that the audience members won't trip on it.
  One exception: if you have plenty of batteries and you're taping in short segments (such as individual musical pieces in a concert), you can swap batteries during the applause. You'll find that audio edits during sustained applause are usually inaudible on playback.
• Cables. In a multi-camera shoot, each camcorder sends a video cable to the mixer/switcher (but not an audio cable, as we'll see shortly). For optimal video quality, use a Y/C cable if the camcorder has a jack for it, and keep cable length as short as possible. Even with Y/C cables, runs of 20 feet or more will degrade the signal.
  And here's a nifty trick for getting easy, first-generation cutaways from a multiple camera setup: while you're laying down the switched signal on a VCR, keep a backup tape rolling in every camera. That way, if you have three cameras, for example, you'll obtain not one cutaway tape to choose from, but three.
• Communications. If you're working solo, communicate with your camcorder by wearing headphones to monitor audio quality. Camera operators in switched, multi-camera setups should wear intercoms so that the director can tell them what to shoot next. Left to their own judgment, camera people--especially good ones--have a tendency to frame the action very similarly. So unless the director instructs them differently via intercom, they'll often compose shots too much alike to cut between.

Communicating with multiple operators gets us into procedures for fully-switched, multi-camera productions. Such a production may sound involved, requiring expensive equipment. But it's really not, and it really does…